tlambert | October 14, 2006DeSmogBlog has Dan Johnson's statement of Defence against Tim Ball's lawsuit.
Johnson has uncovered more examples of Ball embellishing his academic record. For example, Ball claimed he was an Emeritus Professor when he wasn't. Part of his defence is that Ball had no reputation to be damaged:
Prior to the publication of the words complained of: a) The plaintiff had become notorious, to those that knew of him, as a climate change denier who held unorthodox and scientifically unsupportable statements about climate and the weather.
Ouch.
tlambert | October 13, 2006Jim Hoggan has the details on a brand new Canadian astroturf group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. The chairman is none another than Tim Ball, who is still puffing up his resume. The executive director is Tom Harris, whose other job is at a PR firm, High Park Group that works for the Kyoto-opposing Canadian Electricity Association.
The NSRP has a nicely done site -- looks like there's some money behind them.
tlambert | October 13, 2006Zeyad:
One problem is that the people dismissing - or in some cases, rabidly attacking - the results of this study, including governmental officials who, arguably, have an interest in doing so, have offered no other alternative or not even a counter estimate. This is called denial. When you have no hard facts to discredit a scientific study, or worse, if you are forced to resort to absurd arguments, such as "the Iraqis are lying," or "they interviewed insurgents," or "the timing to publish this study was to affect American elections," or "I don't like the results and they don't fit into my…
tlambert | October 12, 2006Daniel Davies:
This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent.
More Daniel Davies:
When someone dies, you get a death certificate from the hospital, morgue or coroner, in your hand. This bit of the death infrastructure is still working in Iraq. Then the person who issued the death certificate is meant to send a copy to…
tlambert | October 12, 2006Democracy Now has an interview with Les Roberts. On the methodology:
I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn't very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been…
tlambert | October 12, 2006
Latest Tim Blair attempt to refute the Lancet study:
Lancet's number of documented deaths in Iraq, upon which the respected medical journal based its Iraqi mortality study, is but a mere 0.0835% of Lancet's estimated post-invasion death total.
The "estimate" part of Lancet's equation is 99.9%.
Well, I guess that's it for the entire field of statistics.
tlambert | October 12, 2006It seems that war supporters with actual knowledge of statistics aren't willing to criticise the new Lancet study, leaving the field to folks who don't know what they are talking about.
John Howard:
Well, I don't believe that John Hopkins research, I don't. It's not plausible, it's not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey. I think that's absolutely precarious.
It is a ... an unbelievably large number and it's out of whack with most of the other assessments that have been made.
Surveys are the best way to measure these things. The other assessments that are lower such as IBC…
tlambert | October 12, 2006Karl Mogel put together a podcast of the 45th Skeptic's Circle. You can hear the voices of all your favourite skeptical bloggers introducing their posts.
tlambert | October 11, 2006If you followed the debate over the first Lancet study you know that it featured numerous attacks on the study from folks who manifestly did not have a clue about statistics. The new study gives us much more of the same.
First up is President Bush who said:
"I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does Gen. (George) Casey, and neither do Iraqi officials."
and (after a lot of waffling)
"The methodology is pretty well discredited"
Cluster sampling is discredited? Not according to any statistics textbook in the world.
Next we have Blue Crab Boulevard:
This would be almost 400 (article…
tlambert | October 11, 2006The Washington Post buried the story of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq on page A12.
I don't know what inside page the story appeared on in the New York Times, but look what they had on their website (image to right). Three American deaths are much more important than 600,000 Iraqi ones. Gee, New York Times, you could at least pretend to care.
Mind you, there's worse things than burying the study. Malcolm Ritter in the Associated Press did a hatchet job on the study.
A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll…
tlambert | October 11, 2006The Lancet study on deaths in Iraq has been released. Get it here. Here's the summary:
Background An excess mortality of nearly 100 000 deaths was reported in Iraq for the period March, 2003-September, 2004, attributed to the invasion of Iraq. Our aim was to update this estimate.
Methods Between May and July, 2006, we did a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq. 50 clusters were randomly selected from 16 Governorates, with every cluster consisting of 40 households. Information on deaths from these households was gathered.
Findings Three misattributed clusters…
tlambert | October 10, 2006The Washington Post reports on a new Lancet study on excess deaths in Iraq. (Though it buries it on page A12.)
A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. ...
The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated…
tlambert | October 6, 2006Via Sarah Pullman, a handy guide to the history and practice of Canadian Astroturf.
tlambert | October 6, 2006Tina Rosenberg has an extremely misleading article in the New York Times touting DDT as a magic bullet against malaria. The give away in such articles is the way the author never mentions resistance to DDT. Here's the only mention of resistance:
Throughout Africa, until recently, countries were using chloroquine to cure malaria, a medicine that cost pennies, and so could be bought by rural families. But mosquitoes had become resistant to it.
This isn't even correct. The malaria parasite, not mosquitoes, has become resistant to chloroquine.
Rosenberg's failure to mention resistance is…
tlambert | October 5, 2006One of the things that gave Andrew Bolt 0 out of 10 on global warming was his misleading account of Severinghaus' research. Crikey reports:
Severinghaus told Crikey that he doesn't make a habit of Googling his own research, but Bolt appeared on his radar when a librarian in Brisbane wrote to him asking if "I'd really meant what Bolt said I meant".
He didn't. "Many, many other studies have found that carbon dioxide causes the earth to warm. This is not controversial, and to continue to deny it is akin to denying that cigarette smoking causes cancer," Severinghaus told Crikey. "The evidence for…
tlambert | October 5, 2006Last year I wrote:
The Australian Environmental Foundation is a brand new environmental organization. Unfortunately they have chosen a very similar name to the long established Australian Conservation Foundation, so similar that the ACF has sued for trademark infringement. Probably the best way to keep them apart is to remember that the Australian Conservation Foundation is a grass roots organization with a goal of preserving forests, while the Australian Environmental Foundation is an astroturf organization with a goal of preserving logging companies.
The AEF has now handed out its first…
tlambert | October 4, 2006Warwick Hughes has a post claiming that there were high CO2 levels in the atmosphere in the 1940s "contrary to IPCC science" pointing to a something by E-G Beck. Here's Beck's graph:
Now, a normal person looking at that would conclude that chemical measurement of CO2 concentrations was not particularly accurate, but Beck concludes that there were huge fluctations in CO2 that ended by some strange coincidence exactly when they started making more accurate measurements.
Eli Rabett explains what is wrong:
Here we will briefly summarize the paper and then point out why it is wrong, not only…
tlambert | October 2, 2006Jeff Dorchen comments on the DDT astroturf crew:
Of course, if you are psychotically averse to government policies, I suppose you might be deluded into thinking Rachel Carson, a zoologist who wrote a book on the environmental risks of chemical pesticides, was a mass murderer. But you would still be delusional. A sick, delusional person trying to smear, by extension, the entire sphere of activity and study known as "environmentalism." You are saying, "Thousands and thousands of scientists, activists and policy-makers are all just a bunch of irresponsible mass-murderers!" Now is that something…
tlambert | October 1, 2006The examples of the Bush Administration muzzling scientists just keep coming.
The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports:
[Researchers Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory] say the press releases and the position paper detailed reports linking intensified hurricanes to global warming. The reports also predict spells of intense weather like droughts and floods, and paint some warming as irreversible, the scientists say.
"What can I tell you? I was telling them something they didn't want to hear," said Richard Wetherald, a career scientist at the federally funded center. "But the public is not being…
tlambert | October 1, 2006Naadir has posted a couple of videos from BBC Newsnight on global warming denialists. Melanie Philips is revealed to be just as clueless as I suspected.